How-to: Get 1024x768 back on an Eeepc 1005HA after a Windows 7 upgrade

I love netbooks. They're like the USS Voyager - small, portable, and useful, and able to go to places where a full-sized notebook will be overkill. I can totally see why folks are buying the iPad in such huge numbers, but I don't think that tablets will ever completely replace the netbook; netbooks are just too useful. I think that both tablets and netbooks have a useful niche in the gizmonic hierarchy.

I got an Asus Eeepc 1005HA last fall, and I love it. It was a dramatic upgrade over my first netbook, a Dell Inspiron 910 with a tiny little 4GB solid-state drive, and I've grown to really love the small form factor, the extended battery life, and the nearly full-sized keyboard. I routinely take my 1005HA on trips where I can expect a four or more hours on an airplane instead of my larger notebook. Last week, I added another GB of RAM (bringing the total to 2 GB) and upgraded the OS to be Windows 7. I had held off upgrading from the OEM Windows XP because I was afraid that Windows 7 would be too much of a resource hog and cut into the battery life on my 1005HA, which running XP is a phenomenal 10+ hours. However, I really like Windows 7 and wanted to get all of my PCs running the latest and greatest version of the world's easiest to use and stable operating system, so I took the plunge. My fears were totally unjustified - the upgrade to Windows 7 on my 1005HA worked fantastically well, and is snappy and responsive, and the battery life seems to be basically the same.

I give Asustek gets a lot of credit for having outstanding Windows 7 support for their systems. I also upgraded my Dell XPS 1530 laptop to Windows 7 recently, and I have to say, Asus's Windows 7 support is much, much better. Dell never upgraded the wireless card drivers in the XPS 1500 line for Windows 7, so now my XPS laptop gets absolutely terrible wireless reception. On the other hand, Asus fully supports Windows 7 on the 1005HA and so the Windows 7 upgrade went incredibly smoothly. The one hiccup: The Windows XP video drivers for my Eeepc allowed you to select the 1024x768 screen resolution setting needed by such games as Galactic Civilization II, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and Civilization III. All of those games ran really well on the 1005HA...until I upgraded to Windows 7. The default Win7 video drivers for the 1005HA actually improve the video performance quite a bit for video playback and gaming, but they only allow either 800x600 or 1024x600 resolutions. Without that critical 1024x768 option, GalCiv2 won't even start, SMAC truncates the bottom 200 pixels, and CivIII does this annoying scrolling thing.

After some googling, I found some handy instructions for getting the higher resolution settings back. To my surprise, it turns out to be really easy to get the 1024x768 screen resolution back on the 1005HA after a Windows 7 upgrade. Here's how to do it*:

*(generic disclaimer: As with any "How-to's" on this blog, this info is provided as a general public service, and we aren't responsible for anything you do to your own computer. We do not endorse anything on websites linked from this blog, and anything you download from those sites, you do at your own risk. Also please note that this fix isn't guaranteed to work on all systems, and we're not experts on this sort of thing to begin with, so don't blame us if your computer goes **poof** because you followed any of the procedures you see here.)

1) Run the Windows Registry Editor (Run > regedit)

2) Back up your registry

3) Search for all values that match "Display1_DownScalingSupported" and change their values from "0" to "1". There were two matches for that variable in my system's registry - change them both.

4) Restart the system.

That ought to do it! You should have two new resolutions, 1024x768 and 1152x864. Now you can play GalCiv2, SMAC, and CivIII! They might be a little squished, but they'll run.

How-to: Get Knights of the Old Republic Working in Windows 7

In my opinion, Windows 7 is really the greatest, most intuitive, most responsive, and most fun to use operating system on the planet today. However, as great as Windows 7 is, the downside to upgrading to this superlative computing experience is that some older, legacy software titles do not function as expected. One of those titles is BioWare's 2003 epic Knights of the Old Republic. Recently, we here at SRV wanted to take a nostalgic tour through Knights of the Old Republic, but were stymied by the fact that it would only run for about 5 minutes of gameplay, then crash to the desktop. After much googling, we determined a set of steps that seems to get the software working under Windows 7 - or, at least we haven't had a problem yet, anyway*.
*(generic disclaimer: As with any "How-to's" on this blog, this info is provided as a general public service, and we aren't responsible for anything you do to your own computer. We do not endorse anything on websites linked from this blog, and anything you download from those sites, you do at your own risk. Also please note that this fix isn't guaranteed to work on all systems, and we're not experts on this sort of thing to begin with, so don't blame us if your computer goes **poof** because you followed any of the procedures you see here.)

We eventually found what we needed to know at this excellent comprehensive post over at the LucasArts forums. Here are the steps that we followed to get it working on our own systems:

Step 1: Apparently Windows 7 allows fractional screen refresh rates (i.e., 59.35 Hz) where previous versions of Windows forced those numbers to be integers (i.e., 59 or 60). So, you have to set your monitor refresh rate to be 60 Hz, the only setting that KOTOR recognizes. I know my monitor is rated to 70 Hz, so this isn't a problem for me, but your mileage may vary. Find the display properties tab and override so that the refresh rate is manually set to 60 Hz.

Step 2: Install KOTOR from the original installation disks. Note that I did not run the setup as administrator and I haven't had any problems. Some of the advice I saw on the internet suggested that you run the installation as administrator.

Step 3: Patch the game to 1.03, which adds new higher resolution display options as choices.

Step 4: Download the unofficial Vista/7 KOTOR fix and replace the mss32.dll file in the KOTOR directory with this unofficial!!! fix file.

Step 5: [Optional] Supposedly, installing a no-CD crack can help to keep the game from locking up. I didn't do that and it works fine, but I bring it up here out of completeness.

Step 6: In the main KOTOR directory, edit the swkotor.ini file. In the [graphics options] section, add a line:

Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1

Step 7: We currently have NVIDIA graphics systems here at SRV, so this step will obviously not help those with ATI graphics. You Radeon users are on your own at this point. However, NVIDIA users should open the NVIDIA control panel, select the 3D settings tab and click "add program". Select swkotor.exe. Set "Vertex Sync" to "Force on".

Step 8: Right click on SWKOTOR.exe. Select "Properties." On the compability tab, for the compatibility mode, select "Windows XP SP 3" Also check the following items on the compatibility tab: "Disable visual themes", "Disable desktop composition", and "Disable display scaling on High DPI systems".

Step 9: Make new shortcut to SWKOTOR.exe and use this new shortcut to start the game.

That should do it! We followed these steps and the game has been agreeably stable in Windows 7 64-bit.

On my soapbox: I do feel constrained to point out that KOTOR is still being sold as part of the "Star Wars: Greatest PC Hits" compilation in brick-and-mortar stores as well as a direct download from Steam, so I would humbly suggest to LucasArts that they might want to invest some resources in coming up with a Windows 7 patch for the game. If KOTOR had been "abandoned" and was no longer commercially available, then I would completely understand that people play it at their own risk on modern systems. However, I feel strongly that if something is available in the marketplace, vendors have a responsibility to the end-users to make things as easy as possible. This is especially true for PC Gaming, which, after all, is supposed to be, y'know, fun and whatnot. Generally, complicated 8-step procedures that involve twiddling with important system settings culled off the webbytubes isn't as fun as playing the game that you were looking forward to. Still, it's worth it to be able to play KOTOR again!